On: US or Iran: Who will win the Hormuz endurance game?

The light falls slantwise across the newspaper left open on the breakfast table - that harsh, angular light of late morning which makes even the most sober headlines appear theatrical. The words “Hormuz” and “endurance” sit there like actors waiting for their cue, and I find myself staring at them as one stares at the sea, waiting for some pattern to emerge from the restless surface.

The whole business has the quality of a party where everyone is pretending not to notice the tension - the way men in uniforms and men in suits arrange themselves around a room, each convinced of their own endurance, each measuring the other’s stamina against some invisible clock. (And what is endurance, after all, but the ability to keep up appearances while the body aches for rest?)

Tehran hardened by sanctions, Washington flinching at oil prices - it all feels like a game of chess played in a drawing room where the curtains are too heavy, the air too still. The real contest is not in the strait but in the waiting, in the way the mind frays at the edges when forced to sustain a posture indefinitely.

I think of the fishermen I once saw off the Cornish coast, their boats rising and falling with a rhythm that seemed both violent and indifferent. They endured not by defiance but by yielding - by knowing when to lean into the wave and when to let it pass.

The paper rustles in a draft from the open window. The light shifts. The words remain, but the moment - the feeling of something about to break or bend - has already gone.